Become a Fan

30 April 2006

1. Grab the nearest book2. Open it to page 1233. Find the fifth sentence4. Copy it onto your blog/journal along with these instructions

"Also, such a discussion will be diagnostic rather than hortatory: it will be more concerned with how effects are produced than with what effects should be produced."

[Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 1968 (1931); emphasis in original]

Just for kicks here's the same exercise performed on my own book for a me-meme (3me): "This practice was mostly a hygienic measure, as oil served to keep dirt, sand, and dust out of the pores." Man, that could use some airbrush action, though it's kind of funny if imagined as a followup sentence to Burke's. Yah, I don't recommend the me-meme.

On Friday, I drafted an account of that morning's opening panel at the CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes) meeting called "The Fate of Disciplines," and promptly lost 4 paragraphs or so by tempting fate with an unsecure wireless connection called WINGS. (Not quite as good as the one I connected to at Cs called "worm virus," a title so obviously chosen to ward off drafters that I knew it was harmless.)

That panel, though, featured a really terrific duo of talks presented by Robert Post (Yale Law) and Judith Butler (Berkeley Rhetoric) on the question of "What is a Discipline?". Post articulated disciplines around techniques of knowledge production, while Butler resisted such a norm-driven notion of disciplines. The interesting thing (to me) is how in her engaging talk, a talk that responded to past encounters with Post, Butler, ever the philosopher of rhetoric, made norms the object of investigation, while Post articulated norms as tools of investigation.

These talks were both really terrific, in that I found myself relating to them from at least four different concrete institutional situations: 1) a massive program merger involving one of my departments; 2) an ongiong discussion of the shape of another program I'm appointed in; 3) a long faculty meeting in my other department on hiring priorities; and 4) a recent piece I wrote on performing disciplinarity (appearing in the next RSQ). Wild stuff.

The problem is that after I lost the draft I left for dinner at Vong Thai Kitchen and then really couldn't muster much rewriting energy after all those noodles. Mmm, noodles.

Re-entry involved catching up on two notable news events that CNN at the Chicago Sheraton didn't cover: namely the IHE and Chronicle coverage of my colleague Cary Nelson's first act as president of the American Association of University Professors--getting arrested in New York--and Stephen Colbert's presentation at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Both audacious in similar (and similarly good) shake-em-up ways.

27 April 2006

John and I woke up very early this morning to hop the train to Chicago for the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes' annual meeting. The topic of this meeting is "The Fate of the Disciplines," which sounds a little less sunny than the "future of the disciplines" discourse typically flying about. And given some of the mixed panels listed on the lobby easel--one panel is called "Cinema Studies and Philology"--the title of the meeting might well be changed to "Fight of the Disciplines." But that's just a guess.

It's also my first tagalong conference (John is the one who works for the Humanities Program on our campus), which means I haven't seen John since we parted at the train station, but I have seen a lot of Michigan Avenue. For my money, which isn't much since I'm mooching, buying new tee shirts is a lot better than watching a philologist and a film theorist try to cohere. Maybe that's too skeptical. But bear in mind that I do like tee shirts.

Judith Butler is giving a plenary tomorrow, so I'll likely venture down to Hyde Park to hear what she has to say about our disciplinary fate--I promise a full report right here. For now, though, all I know is that while John is rubbing elbows with conferees tomorrow eve, I will be dining at Vong Thai Kitchen on State and Hubbard, a future I really couldn't be happier about.

26 April 2006

At a recent departmental cocktail party, a colleague asked me if I'd "accomplished all [I] hoped to accomplish" this semester, the semester of not teaching. I paused before answering, thinking about the impression that goes with a yes or no answer. Say yes, and I'm a smug overachiever; no, and I'm a slacker. I suppose I set out to do a few things, some more and some less concrete--submit a manuscript to a journal; make good headway on the book--and I've managed to do those things and a few others by writing fairly regularly.

But I started thinking about goals and stuff and to what extent it's necessary to state our goals and check them off on an annual basis. One of my department heads seems to be a big fan of goal making and checking--going so far as to ask us to list goals for next year on our Annual Report--and the other department head doesn't engage as much in goal-oriented discourse.

So I ask you, dear readers, what is your relationship to goal setting? How necessary is goal setting--in the form of actually writing them down and submitting them--for our chosen profession?

23 April 2006

This morning John and I awoke to an empty driveway. Our car was still there (though to be honest I'm not sure we would have noticed if it were not; we never drive the thing) but the Sunday Times, to which we are shamefully addicted, was not. No one else on the street had theirs either, which told us this wasn't just a case of an errant toss. It was 7 am; I had even slept in a little. John, who had been awake since 5 am, was distraught and barely concentrating on the novel he'd settled for. I couldn't imagine what else I could do on a Sunday morning after the coffee was made, so I sat on the front stoop, coffee in fist, and waited. Five minutes in, my across the street neighbor came walking down his driveway, looked around on the ground, gave me a shruggy wave, and U-Turned right back to his house. Down the street from him, a woman was shuffling around in her flowerbed, head down, untied robe flowing behind her, looking for all the world like Jeff Daniels Dude in The Big Lebowski, except up way too early for that character and sans the white russian. The paper arrived around 7:40.

While I was waiting I noticed the tops were gone from our tulips. Damned turkeys.

Tonight after dinner at Courier, a quick stop for contact lens solution turned into a two-town (three if you count 'campustown'), five store search for the shit, complete with a stop at my office to search drugstore.com where it was out of stock too. A more complete web search pulls up rumors that the CIBA Vision plant in Georgia had some contamination problem, and the products were pulled back in February which was the last time I stocked up. Oh, and someone is selling a twin pack of it used on Amazon for 50 beans. Of course this is one of those contact disinfection systems, so I'm not sure what to buy in its place and will now need to call my eye doctor tomorrow. Whatta waste.

22 April 2006

Welcome, carnival-goers! Hold onto your funnel cakes: I want to begin my response to Sharon Crowley's book by citing another response to the book, this from the "Accuracy in America" group's Campus Report Online, whose mission it is to "document and publicize political bias in education." It's probably no surprise that the folks at AIA, where the name, like Fox's slogan "Fair and Balanced," perhaps protests too much, nabbed Crowley's book before it was published. Which is to say that the person documenting and publicizing Crowley's work has really only read the blurb included on the back cover (and hence on Amazon) and has, shall we say, contorted Crowley's points beyond recognition. Consider what the article, which may be found here, says of Toward:

If Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism by Arizona State University English professor Sharon Crowley is academia’s latest attempt to understand Red State voters, the Ivory Tower has a long way to go. “Crowley asserts that rhetorical invention (which includes appeals to values and the passions) is superior in some cases to liberal argument (which often limits its appeals to empirical fact and reasoning) in mediating disagreements where participants are primarily motivated by a moral or passionate commitment to beliefs,” according to the book’s publisher—the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Are these the same empirical, factual and reasoned liberal arguments that conclude that tax cuts hurt the poor despite a multitude of economic data that shows otherwise?

~End Excerpt~

Okay, carnivalers, settle down.

I begin with this excerpt because I want to bring to the fore certain "moments" or "positions" (both terms are defined by Crowley on p. 60) in order to try to simulate the difficulty of the task Crowley set for herself (and by extension for us): the difficulty, that is, of the book's urge to move "toward a civil discourse"--i.o.w, the impulse to engage with apocalyptism or fundamentalism at all.

The CRO excerpt really does, in a most stark way, prove some of Crowley's major points. Apparently in this case, the mere phrase "liberal argument" has prevented Kline from reflecting at all on what the blurb's sentence might mean--that Crowley is trying to take seriously the forces that would prevent someone from engaging a certain stripe of argument (or a sentence)--thereby yielding such an at-first-glance dismissal. And the excerpt works in the other direction equally well: if reading Kline's last line caused the outrage for you that it caused for me, perhaps that also suggests that affect cuts across all manner of convictions--even a faith in statistics and a certain interpretation of those statistics.

Crowley has a strong sense that emotion is too cognitive a way to formulate appeals, given some arguments' capacity to cut right to the viscera. This is likely why Crowley uses the term affect instead of emotion (esp. in chapter 3): affect allows for the cut-to-the-gut force of belief and conviction that this book regards as so crucial for understanding contemporary rhetorical practice.

In addition to Crowley's elaboration of affect as appealable (ch 3), the chapters on apocalypticism (4 and 6) are compelling to me, insofar as they set up one of the book's most surprising claims: "that academic and scientific skepticisms may in fact accelerate the spread of fundamentalisms, may be one reason that apocalyptic beliefs of all kinds are embraced by more and more Americans" (169).

We can see small bits of evidence that the antagonistic relation between academic criticism and critics of academia is doing nothing but strengthening the conviction (and perhaps spread) of the latter. In the AIA/CRO report excerpted above, the strategies of dismissal (as terribly weak as they might seem to our belief, values, and knowledge making habits) are used to effectively reinforce existing convictions; a wave of the hand meets the already-knowing nod of the head, working to further sediment resolve.

I have more to say on this score and am especially interested in what directions Crowley's book might (tacitly) suggest for subfields like science studies and for emerging work on bodily rhetoric (Donna, I'm betting you have something to say on this score--looking forward to that), and even, yes, pedagogy, for which the theories of invention presented early on (ch 2) hold interesting implications.

19 April 2006

I have been at my computer screen so long today that I am typing this with my eyes closed. Just lightly closed, like they make us do in yoga class. It makes me type more slowly so that if I need to backspace, then I can do that without looking. I can kind of picture what's going on the screen, and actually this is pretty relaxing, ike typing yoga. My eyes are just

so

tired. They need to be taken outside and placed in front of flowers and trees.

16 April 2006

Roger Cohen ("Vive La Dolce Vita," article, April 16) contrasts Americans' preference for flexibility, efficiency, "hard work," and personal ambition to Western Europeans' desire for job security and protection of workers' rights, including leisure time. In doing so, he offers a generalized, even mythical view of typical American workers in a global economy. For a refutation of Cohen's sweeping portrait of Americans' attitudes toward work, one need look no further than the 'Career Couch' feature of the Sunday Business section, where Matt Villano offers tips to office workers for coping with the increasing expectation that employees work longer days. This section signals grave concerns among Americans about work encroaching on life, concerns that Cohen attributes exclusively to workers in France and Italy.

But it's the response to such conditions that marks a crucial cultural difference. By finally invoking the advice of an organizational consultant, "it may be time to start looking for a less demanding job," the section settles for a meek and hesitant (not to mention individualisitic) solution. Sunday Business would never encourage these overworked American employees to organize, to collectively and publicly question such trends, and so on the questions of workers' rights, workers of France and Italy come out looking much less quaint than Cohen's portrait allows, and--strikingly--far more ambitious.